Rigoberta Menchu, The Philippine
Revolution, and US Production of Knowledge: Speaking Truth to Power?by E. San Juan,
Jr.
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 10, 2005

The
recent controversy over Nobel prizewinning Guatemalan activist Rigoberta
Menchu and her authority as an indigenous spokesperson brings into sharp
relief the substantive issues of objectivity versus human interest in what
has come to be known as the current “Culture Wars.” It serves as a timely
reminder that the dispute over truth (now referred to as “truth effect,”
after Foucault and postmodern nominalists) and its representation is
transnational in scope and perennial in nature. It evokes the memory of some
durable controversies in the humanities and social science disciplines that
have assumed new disguises since the “two cultures” of C.P. Snow, or much
earlier, the anarchy/culture polarity of Matthew Arnold. Should the tale be
trusted over the teller, as D.H. Lawrence once advised? Or is it the case
that if there is no teller, there is no worthwhile tale?

Obviously the question
of knowledge of what is real, its legitimacy and relevance, occupies center
stage. Much more than this, however, in the secular/technological milieu of
late modernity, what concerns us is the usage to which such knowledge,
whether of the natural world and society, is put. Inflected in the realm of
knowledge about culture and society, the problem of representing the world
(events, personalities) looms large, distilled in such questions as: Who
speaks now? For whom? And for what purpose?

Who Speaks? For
Whom in the Name of What?

One way of responding
to such questions is by evasion. The pursuit of truth, objectively detached
from the perspective of the truth-seeker, ironically dispenses with speaker,
circumstance, and addressee. It displaces what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the
dialogic scene of communication. The truth-seeker interested in the content
of the tale asks: Is Rigoberta Menchu telling the truth, that is, conveying
accurately the objective facts about the torture of her family?

Anthropologist David
Stoll, the author of Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of all Poor
Guatemalans, testifies that Menchu is lying. Seemingly adhering to a
traditional positivist standard, Stoll argues that Menchu's testimonio
“cannot be the eyewitness account it purports to be” because he compares it
with the reports of his informants in Guatemala. No one, however, has
checked the veracity of these informants. Are they more reliable? Under what
criteria? Stoll contends that Mayans who did not side with the guerillas are
more trustworthy, or at least their reports vitiate Menchu's credibility.
Stoll accepts quite naively the other versions of what happened in
Guatemala, and for him they are more authentic, if not more veridical. Those
versions invalidate the truth-telling authority of Menchu's autobiography.

Protagonists on either
side do not stake their positions on details but on the theoretical
framework which makes intelligible both Menchu's narrative and Stoll's
interrogation. Literary critic John Beverley, for example, emphasizes the
genre or discursive structure of Menchu's testimonio. He underscores
Menchu's ideological agenda and her pragmatic aim of inducing solidarity. On
the other hand, Stoll, D'Souza and other detractors try to counter Menchu's
revolutionary agenda by their politically-correct demand for truth
regardless of genre or stylistic form in which such truth is found. In a
review (The Nation Feb. 8, 2000) of Stoll's book and Menchu's recent
testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala,
Greg Grandin and Francisco Goldman cogently show the inconsistencies of
Stoll's position. Both sides, it seems, do not quarrel over certain “givens”
which are described in other accounts (see, for example, Eduardo Galeano's
Guatemala Occupied Country). In an essay in Global Visions(1993, p.20), sociologist John Brown Childs writes: “At least 100,000
indigenous peoples have been murdered by (U.S. supported) government forces;
at least 40,000 have ‘disappeared’, which is to say they have been murdered;
450 villages have been destroyed; and 250,000 people have been turned into
refugees because of government ‘anti-guerilla’ campaigns aimed at the Mayan
population.” Since Menchu is not expressing this “given”, it seems
acceptable to all parties.

Truth Versus
Reality?

We are not rehearsing
the ancient dictum about objective scientific truth in chronicles and annals
versus reality based on individual experience. Many members of the academic
community are familiar, to one degree or another, with the antithetical
modes of historiography and the attendant controversy elucidated sometime
ago by E.H. Carr (What is History?). There is a continuing debate
between those who espouse a naturalist or scientific point of view typified
by historians like Marc Bloch, and those who advocate a hermeneutic or
interpretive view upheld by R.G. Collingwood, Barraclough, and others. Carr
himself tried to strike a compromise when he asserted that "the historian is
engaged on a continuous process of molding the facts to his interpretation
and his interpretation to his facts," unable to assign primacy to one over
the other. But what are the facts? Obviously one cannot search for the facts
without some orientation or guideline concerning the totality of social
relations and circumstances where those "facts" are located; otherwise, how
can one distinguish a fact from a non-fact?

Postmodern thinkers
influenced by poststructuralist trends (deconstruction; de Certeau, Rorty,
Clifford) contend that objective truth in historical writing is impossible.
History is not a body of incontrovertible, retrievable solid facts (in Mr.
Gradgrind's sense) but a text open to various, disparate interpretations.
Although I am not a “fan” of Michel Foucault, it may be useful to insert him
into this debate. Foucault's lesson for us is that historical accounts are
problematic representations of life because they are constituted by
heterogeneous cultural codes and complex social networks entailing shifting
power differentials. Knowledge, in short, is always complicit with power.
Ultimately, questions of truth reflect conflicting ideologies and political
interests associated with unstable agencies. Not that reality is a mere
invention or fiction, but that its meanings and significances are, to use
the current phrase, “social constructions” that need to be contextualized
and estimated for their historically contingent validity. Such constructions
are open to critique and change. From this angle, both Menchu’s testimony
and Stoll's debunking are riddled with ambiguities and undecidables that
cannot be resolved by mere arbitration over facts--such arbitration and
facts are themselves texts or discourses that need to be accounted for, and
so on. In the end, it's all a question of power and hegemony. Or is it?

The excesses of
postmodernist reductionism are now being acknowledged even by its
practitioners. What discipline or method of inquiry can claim to be
justified by a thoroughgoing skepticism and relativism? While I do not
subscribe to an over valorized notion of power, whether decentered or
negotiated through an “infinite chain of signifiers,” a power not embedded
in concrete sociopolitical formations, I think the stress on historical
grounding is salutary. This is perhaps a commonplace. But I mention it
nevertheless to foreground the need to be more critical about the
contemporary resonance of what is involved in historical representation of
non-Western groups, collectivities, and peoples by intellectuals of the
economically powerful North. Self-awareness of the limits of one's mode of
knowing Others is now a precondition for any engagement with subjects that
once were defined or constituted by ethnocentric, preemptive, and often
exploitative world-views and their coercive apparatuses.

Politics of
Mis-recognizing the Other: The Case of the Philippines

We confront here an
enactment of the subtle politics of Othering, an ubiquitous theme of the now
banal identity politics, when Stoll subjects Menchu to interrogation. When
“first world” producers of knowledge of indigenous peoples claim to offer
the "truth" or the credible representation of people of color inhabiting
colonized, “postcolonial” or neocolonial regions and internal dependencies,
shouldn't we stop and ask what is going on, who is speaking to whom and for
what purpose? There are no pure languages of inquiry where traces or
resonances of the intonation, words, idioms and tones of the Others cannot
be found. I want to cite a recent and somewhat analogous case here that
concerns the relation between contemporary American scholarship and the
production of knowledge about Philippine history.

The centenary
celebrations of the 1896-98 Philippine revolution against its former
colonial power, Spain, have just ended when interest in Spain's successor,
the United States, was sparked by the U. S. government's recent demand for
virtually unlimited rights of military access to Philippine territory. With
the loss of its military bases in 1992, the United States is trying to
regain, and reinforce in another form, its continuing hegemony over its
former colony.

The Philippine
revolution which succeeded in defeating the Spaniards ended when the U.S.
intervened in 1898. The Filipino American War broke out in February 1898 and
lasted for at least a decade. A lingering dispute exists as to how many
Filipinos actually died in this “first Vietnam.” The exact description of
the Filipino genocide is still lacking. Stanley Karnow, the popularizer of
U.S. scholarship on the Philippines, cites two hundred thousand Filipinos
while the Filipino historian Renato Constantino puts it at 600,000, the
number of casualties in Luzon alone, given by General Bell, one of the
military planners of the “pacification” campaigns. Another scholar,
Luzviminda Francisco, concludes that if we take into account the other
campaigns in Batangas, Panay, Albay, and Mindanao, the total could easily be
a million (The Philippines Reader, 1987, p. 19). Do we count
the victims of “collateral damage,” civilians not involved in direct
fighting? The U.S. strategy in fighting a guerilla war then was to force all
the natives into concentration camps in which many died of starvation,
disease, and brutal treatment. What is the truth and who has it? Where are
the reliable informants who can provide authentic narratives? Whom are we to
believe?

In the Balangiga,
Samar, incident of September 28, 1901, exactly forty-five American soldiers
were killed by Filipino guerilla partisans. The Filipinos suffered 250
casualties during the attack and another twenty soon after. In retaliation,
General Jacob Smith ordered the killing of all Filipinos above the age of
ten; in a few months, the whole of Samar was reduced to a “howling
wilderness.” No exact figures of total Filipino deaths are given by Karnow
and other American historians. Exactly what happened in the numerous cases
of American military atrocities against Filipinos investigated by the U.S.
is still a matter of contention. But there is general agreement that the war
was distinguished by, in the words of Filipino historian Teodoro Agoncillo,
“extreme barbarity.” Exactly how many died in the Samar campaign, or during
the entire war, is again a matter of who is doing the counting, what are the
criteria employed, and for what purpose. Historiographic methodology by
itself cannot answer our demand for a sense of the whole, a cognitive grasp
or mapping of the total situation. Other processes of discovery and logic of
confirming belief are required.

Myth-Making
or Historical Speculation?

Of more immediate
relevance to the Menchu/Stoll non-exchange is the recent hullabaloo over the
stature of the Filipino revolutionary hero Andres Bonifacio (1863-1897). An
American specialist in area studies, Glenn May, acquired instant notoriety
when his book Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-creation of Andres
Bonifacio came out in 1992. In a supercilious tone, May questioned the
veracity of certain documents attributed to Bonifacio by Filipino
intellectuals and political leaders. Without any actual examination of the
documents in question, May, hedging with numerous “maybes” and “perhaps”,
accused Filipino historians -- from Agoncillo to Reynaldo Ileto -- of either
forging documents or fraudulently assigning to Bonifacio certain texts
responsible for his heroic aura and reputation.

Except for evincing
the customary and pedestrian rationale for the academic profession, this
exercise in debunking an anti-colonial hero lends itself to being construed
as a cautionary tale. It can be interpreted as a more systematic attempt by
a member of the superior group to discredit certain Filipino nationalist
historians who are judged guilty of fraud and other underhanded practices
unworthy of civilized intellectuals. Ileto's defense tries to refute the
prejudgment. He accuses May of privileging “colonial archives” over oral
testimonies, of deploying the patron-client/tutelage paradigm which
prejudices all of May's views of Filipinos, and one-sidedly discounting any
evidence that contradicted May's thesis that the Philippine revolution was
really a revolt of the elites, not of the masses. In short, May's version of
the “truth” cannot be trusted because he functions (whether he is aware of
it or not) as an apologist of U.S. imperial policy, a role that has a
venerable genealogy of scholars from the anthropologist Dean Worcester to
academic bureaucrats like David Steinberg, Theodore Friend, and Peter
Stanley. Their scholarly authority cannot be divorced from the continuing
involvement of the U.S. corporate elite in asserting its control, however
indirect or covert, over Philippine political, cultural, and economic
affairs. I suppose that joining this group of luminaries is enough
compensation for May and other “disinterested” seekers of facts and truth.

As in the Menchu/Stoll
confrontation, May's outright condemnation of at least four generations of
Filipino scholars and intellectuals is revealing in many ways. The
following heuristic questions may be offered for further reflection and
discussion: Should we still insist in the axiomatic dualism of objective
truth and subjective interpretation in accounts of fraught events? Shouldn't
we consider the exigencies of the dialogic communication: who are the
parties involved? In what historical moments? In what arena or set of
circumstances can a citizen of a dominant global power question the veracity
of a citizen/subject of a subordinated country without this act being
considered an imperial intrusion and imposition? Can the investigation of
individual facts or events in these dependent polities be considered
legitimate as sources of “objective” knowledge without taking into account
the hierarchical ordering of nation-state relations? What attitude should
researchers from these powerful centers of learning adopt that will dispel
the suspicion of “third world” peoples that they are partisans of a
neocolonizing program, if not unwitting instruments of their government?
Obviously, the more immediate stakes in the ongoing “culture wars” are
social policies and programs within the United States, with secondary
implications in terms of foreign policy and academic priorities. Still, we
cannot ignore how the attacks on indigenous testimonios like Menchu,
or heroic figures of nation-states that claim to be sovereign and
independent (including scholars and intellectuals of these nation-states),
are both allegories of internal political antagonisms/class warfare and the
literal battlefields for recuperating the now attenuated imperial glory of
Pax Americana of the Cold War days. After Abu Ghraib and the
revelations about outrageous torture procedures in Guantanamo, reality has
now superseded the truth-telling propaganda of the Bush administration and
its apologists.

At Last, the
Subaltern Speaks

Contrary to some
pundits of deconstruction, I believe the subaltern or the colonized subject,
whether Menchu or Agoncillo (now deceased), can perform the role of witness
and “speak truth to power.” Menchu can and has indeed ably struggled to
represent herself and her people in times of emergency and crisis. Her Nobel
Prize award may be considered an index of her effectiveness. For the
indigenous peoples of Guatemala and other dependent formations, the purpose
of speech is not just for universally accepted legitimate cultural reasons
-- affirming their identities and their right of self-determination -- but,
more crucially, for their physical survival. Such speech entails
responsibility, hence the need to respond to criticisms or questions about
“truth” and its grounding. In particular, it entails judgment about justice
and accountability.

A warning by Walter
Benjamin may be useful to clarify the notion of “truth” in lived situations
where “facts” -- the gritty incalculables of reality --intermesh with
feeling and conviction. In his famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
Benjamin expressed reservations about orthodox historians like Leopold von
Ranke whom Marx considered “a little root-grubber” who reduced history to
“facile anecdote-mongering and the attribution of all great events to petty
and mean causes.” Benjamin speculated that the “truth” of the past can be
seized only as an image, as a memory “as it flashes up at a moment of
danger.” I believe this moment of danger is always with us when, in a time
of settling accounts in the name of justice, we see the Stolls and Mays
suddenly come up with their credentials and entitlements in order to put the
“upstart” subalterns in their proper place. This is also the moment for us
to take sides.